A phrase we never thought was possible – “the internet is down”, was being shouted across the world on Tuesday 8th June 2021. Alarm bells were ringing when hundreds of websites had an “error 503” show up when visitors tried to access them. So what happened to the internet? A relatively unknown company soon dominated global news headlines for causing the websites’ “blackout”.
After you register the domain for your website, you might take pride in owning your company’s online address. However, from a legal standpoint, you don’t own it. While you can register it, thieves can hijack it from you. Domain hijacking does not receive a lot of attention, but it is a real threat. Domain hijacking is also very frustrating, as it is relatively easy for thieves to hijack a domain, and once they get control, it can be very difficult and expensive to regain it.
As May draws to a close, it’s that time again to share with you the most surprising websites that went down this month. Now, I don’t like to “out” anyone but I do like to use these to emphasise that website downtime can affect any website, big or small. And ultimately, the impact is the same – potential customers gone elsewhere, higher bounce rate, lower SEO, and worst of all, lost revenue.
Have you ever wondered why your bounce rate is always over 70% and can never quite figure out why? Your content reads great, you’ve got top-notch videos of your products, and you’ve even got a testimonial from Microsoft saying how good your company is! Well, all of these things seem to have little impact on visitors to your website if you have a) constant pop-ups or b) slow page loading speed (and if you have both, I’d disable Google Analytics now…).
Unplanned downtime is the hardest situation to prepare for as it could happen at any time. The only way that you can plan for that eventuality is by having a website monitoring solution in place that can alert you as soon as your website goes down. If you’re the first to know, then it makes it easier for you to do something about it before your customers start reacting, especially on social media.
As we are all well aware, this month Google will be updating its algorithm with the aim of improving the user experience. With these changes, however, it’s reported that many of the top-ranking websites will be affected, meaning they need to take action now to ensure all of the hard SEO work they’ve done is not lost.
Let me start by telling you a story about someone that couldn’t spot a fake website. I was speaking to my best friend two days ago, catching up over some now-allowed outside brunch when she dropped an absolute clanger on me.
I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, on the contrary, I think that the more we talk about website downtime, the more people that will be aware that it happens to the best of us. I’ve put together some of the most well-known companies in the world on this April’s downtime list so you can see for yourself just how easy it is for your website to go down, regardless of how many pennies are in the bank.
If you’re a Facebook user, brace yourself for this one. It’s recently come to light that 533 million Facebook users’ details were found on a very suspicious hacker forum. The details found include users’ phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdays, and email addresses – all typical information that is stored on a Facebook account.
We often get requests from our customers on how to monitor a Windows server or workstation with StatusCake. So today I wanted to take you through a great method of doing this that you should be able to set up in just a few minutes on a Windows 10 workstation, or Windows server. We provide this coverage using the PUSH variant of our uptime monitoring – a type of reverse monitoring that requires the device to contact us in order to demonstrate downtime.
